Babies may lack vocabulary, but they use babbling to tell parents and even strangers, “Hey, I’m talking to you!” – and they expect a response.
In a new study, Cornell psychology researchers have found that babies learn their prelinguistic vocalizations – coos, grunts and vowel sounds – change the behaviors of other people, a key building block of communication. It is one of the first…
Improving indoor air quality, supporting equitable and sustainable development, and advancing offshore wind energy — those are some of the projects being supported by this year’s round of Academic Venture Fund (AVF) seed grants for research from Cornell Atkinson.
Nine projects were chosen for the 15th year of AVF grants, the center’s research incubator for innovative, interdisciplinary,…
Jason Koski/Cornell University
Martha Haynes speaks at Reunion 2013.
When Martha Haynes was thirteen years old, her brother convinced her to give him a big chunk of her babysitting money so he could buy a telescope. He never used it much, but Haynes found the night sky fascinating.
“I remember showing the rings of Saturn and the moons of Jupiter to a couple of passing police officers one night,” she wrote. The thrill she got from explaining to them what they…
The new Excellence in Professional Staff Academic Advising Awards recognizes the critical work of front-line academic advisors in Cornell’s colleges, academic departments, and central advising units across campus.
Steph Cowling-Rich, Asst. Director of the Office of Academic Diversity Initiatives (OADI), , says the inspiration for the awards is “to elevate the work of professional staff…
Ryan Young / Cornell University
Fernando Santiago ’86 received the Cornell New York State Hometown Alumni Award on June 22, at a ceremony at the Genesee Valley Club in Rochester.
Fernando Santiago ’86 never had the chance to focus on academics in high school. He managed a pizza restaurant 28 hours per week to make ends meet.
At Cornell, all that changed.
“I’ll forever be indebted to Cornell and the kindness and goodwill of its donors who, decades and even centuries before, decided to provide a world-class education to students regardless of their financial ability…
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Gloire Rubambiza installs moisture sensors at the Cornell Orchards.
When Gloire Rubambiza was installing a digital agriculture system at the Cornell Orchards and greenhouses, he encountered a variety of problems, including connectivity and compatibility issues, and equipment frozen under snow.
Rubambiza, a doctoral student in the field of computer science, was able to solve these problems thanks to a university that gave him time, funding and institutional…
It’s a quaint fantasy: pack up your belongings, hop on a plane and escape to a remote island or maybe even found a tiny nation of your own, where you can live unencumbered by the constraints of society.
What could go wrong?
Plenty, according to Raymond Craib, the Marie Underhill Noll Professor of History in the College of Arts and Sciences. In his new book, “Adventure Capitalism:…
One typically turns to rabbis for spiritual advice and guidance on Jewish law, but the Babylonian Talmud, a collection of rabbinic writings produced by Jews living in ancient Persia, 224-651 C.E., also contains a great deal of medical knowledge, according to a new book by a Cornell author.
In “Medicine in the Talmud: Natural and Supernatural Therapies Between Magic and Science,” Jason…
Jason Koski/Cornell University
Riché Richardson, professor of Africana studies in the College of Arts and Sciences.
Juneteenth reminds Riché Richardson of the exciting church services she attended growing up, where the congregation celebrated the Emancipation Proclamation on New Year’s Day. Young people in her hometown of Montgomery, Alabama, spoke to the congregation about the value of hard work, achievement and making a contribution to society.
“It was powerful to see seniors literally in tears…
Lindsay France
Marie Dorvilne, standing, helps Yanick Pierre-Louis, as her home care worker.
“Stop it, stop it!” Yanick Pierre-Louis, 68, slapped her knees, frustrated they wouldn’t stop trembling. Again, her body refused to do what she wanted.
She had just spent an excruciating 25 minutes walking, grimacing with each step, from her recliner in her Brooklyn home to her front door and back, leaning on her walker. Marie Dorvilne, her home care worker since 2017, walked behind Yanick…
Acclaimed writer Alison Lurie’s life and work will be honored in a memorial service on July 1 at 5 p.m. in the Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium in Klarman Hall on the Cornell campus, followed by a reception at 6:30 p.m. in the Klarman atrium. The service and the reception are open to the public. The service will be viewable to all through livestream.
“Cornell was extremely fortunate to have Alison…
Some years ago – never mind how long precisely – Aaron Sachs, browsing an Ithaca library book sale as a way of driving off the spleen and regulating circulation, stumbled upon a biography of Herman Melville that he hadn’t known about.
The 1929 work by the literary critic and historian Lewis Mumford had helped revive Melville from obscurity. And Sachs, a history professor in the College of Arts…
Krishna Mallayya/Provided
An example of 3D X-ray diffraction data going through a phase transition upon cooling. The magenta plot shows special points associated with charge density wave formation as they were revealed by the machine learning algorithm X-TEC.
Electrons and their behavior pose fascinating questions for quantum physicists, and recent innovations in sources, instruments and facilities allow researchers to potentially access even more of the information encoded in quantum materials.
However, these research innovations are producing unprecedented – and until now, indecipherable – volumes of data.
“The information content in a…
Shami Chatterjee/Provided
The 500-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope, known as FAST, in Ghizou province, southwest China
A rare and persistent rapid-fire fast radio burst source – sending out an occasional and informative cosmic ping from more than 3.5 billion light years away – now helps to reveal the secrets of the broiling hot space between the galaxies.
What excites astronomers about the repeating fast radio bursts (FRBs) – since they only burst once, generally speaking – is that these quick-fire surges…
Los Angeles County Museum of Art. 78.74 × 62.23 cm
Saint Augustine, oil on canvas by Philippe de Champaigne, c. 1645–50
Augustine of Hippo, a Christian bishop living in northern Africa in the fourth and fifth centuries, is known for his voluminous writing on a wide range of topics – free will, knowledge, the ethics of sex, and more – making him one of the most influential thinkers in Christian history.
But one specific idea infusing Augustine’s philosophy, said scholar Toni Alimi, is hiding in plain sight…
Cornell University file photo
In a 2005 file photo, Epoch editor Michael Koch, standing, reviews fiction and poetry submissions in the Epoch Magazine office with creative writing graduate students Douglas Mitchell M.F.A ’07 and Stephanie Gehring M.F.A ’07.
Michael Koch, the longtime editor of Cornell’s renowned literary magazine and lecturer in the Creative Writing Program in the College of Arts and Sciences, died on May 27 after a brief illness. He was 75.
Remembered by colleagues for his wise, soft-spoken presence and his devotion to literature, Koch brought Epoch, which publishes fiction and poetry, to national prominence during his 34 years…
Jason Koski/Cornell University
Song Lin, associate professor of chemistry
Chemistry professor Song Lin has received a 2022 Green Chemistry Challenge Award from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for his contributions to environmentally sustainable chemical development.
The Green Chemistry Challenge Awards, which recognize chemical technologies that incorporate the principles of green chemistry into chemical design, manufacture and use, were presented June 6…
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The Soil Factory, a large, unremarkable warehouse on the southern edge of Ithaca, has become a collaboration center in 2021 for students, scientists, artists, community members and everyone in between.
Solving societal problems such as climate change could require dismantling rigid academic boundaries, so that researchers from varying disciplines could work together collaboratively – through an “undisciplinary” approach, a new Cornell study suggests.
Instead of rallying around a specific mission, it’s best to incorporate a human approach and fixate on the process to find solutions. The work…
Noël Heaney/Cornell University
Student documentarians Milan Taylor, Adele Williams and Justice Hoff at Loving House.
From exploring Ithaca’s drag history to researching AIDS activism on campus to offering a tour and history of Cornell’s Loving House, students in an Introduction to LGBTQ Studies class this semester brought key events in Cornell’s history to light through short documentaries.
The films created by the class, which draws students from all of Cornell’s schools and colleges, are appropriate as…
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From left to right: Chunyi Hu, Gabriel Schuler and Ailong Ke.
CRISPR has ushered in the era of genomic medicine. A line of powerful tools has been developed from the popular CRISPR-Cas9 to cure genetic diseases. However, there is a last-mile problem – these tools need to be effectively delivered into every cell of the patient, and most Cas9s are too big to be fitted into popular genome therapy vectors, such as the adenovirus-associated virus (AAV).
…
Ray Jayawardhana, the Harold Tanner Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S), has been appointed to a second five-year term, beginning July 1, 2023.
The Cornell Board of Trustees’ Executive Committee voted May 25 to approve the reappointment. Jayawardhana began his tenure as the college’s 22nd dean in 2018.
In addition, the Board of Trustees’ Committee on Academic Affairs voted…
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Cornell Physics junior J Nation performing on their balloon-powered “foghorgan.”
The FutureSounds Festival – an instrument-builder’s extravaganza hosted by the Cornell ReSounds Project, featuring guest builders and performers as well as the newly designed instruments and compositions by Cornell students, took place May 13 at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art.
“The festival’s objective was to enable attendees to encounter the unfamiliar, musically speaking, and find…
Clara Rice ’21 knew she wanted to spend as much time as she could as a Cornell student living and learning abroad. When her plans for an internship in Kenya in the summer of 2020 were canceled because of COVID-19 travel restrictions, she looked for a new opportunity.
Then she learned about the Fulbright U.S. Student Program, administered at Cornell by the Mario Einaudi Center for…
Noël Heaney/Cornell University
Doctoral student Wei Wang of the Itai Cohen Group helped design an artificial cilial system using platinum-based components that can control the movement of fluids at the microscale.
Cilia are the body’s diligent ushers. These microscopic hairs, which move fluid by rhythmic beating, are responsible for pushing cerebrospinal fluid in your brain, clearing the phlegm and dirt from your lungs, and keeping other organs and tissues clean.
A technical marvel, cilia have proved difficult to reproduce in engineering applications, especially at the microscale.
Cornell…
A new and uniquely constructed survey of American voters finds glimmers of hope that Democrats and Republicans can agree on steps needed to shore up an increasingly shaky democracy.
The results show members of both parties want transparent and fair elections, stronger voting rights and believe “cancel culture” is real.
The survey was conducted by government professors Steve Israel and Doug…
Image by catazul from Pixabay
Coal-fired power station Neurath in Grevenbroich, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany
One promising strategy for helping tackle the growing climate crisis is the development of materials that can capture the carbon dioxide released by a range of industrial facilities.
A big hitch is the sheer volume of material that would be required to make an impact, and the equally high price tag that would come with manufacturing it. On top of that, many of the leading contenders…
Matt Hayes/Provided
Senior lecturer Mark Sarvary instructs a student during class in 2017.
While they value in-person interactions, undergraduate students want to keep some of the adaptations developed during online teaching, including online assignment submission and digital question answering, survey research finds.
“We definitely need to realize that we are not returning to the old normal,” said Mark Sarvary, Ph.D. ’06, director of the Investigative Biology Teaching Laboratories…
Chris Kitchen
“Rising Warrior Within” by artist Sherwin Banfield
Two sculptures peer out from among the rows of empty storefronts in the Ithaca Mall. One depicts an ancient Greek athlete holding a discus. The other is of a male warrior’s dramatic face above a roaring lion; “Rising Warrior Within” is by contemporary Black artist Sherwin Banfield.
“The two plaster casts are in dialogue with each other,” said Verity Platt, associate professor of classics and…
Recent awards from the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies will support faculty-led research and international events, send graduate students to research destinations around the world and connect undergraduates with in-person and virtual internships from Ecuador to Zambia and beyond.
The Einaudi Center awarded seed grants, student travel grants and internships totaling $355,000 in…
Canuckguy et al./Creative Commons license 3.0
Fitch ratings of world countries
Agencies that rate and rank nations, corporations and colleges wield enormous power, influencing investment flows and prompting leaders to pursue policies that might improve their standing.
But the source of that clout is puzzling, Cornell economist Kaushik Basu writes in “The Power and Influence of Rating Agencies with Insights into their Misuse,” published in the April issue of the…
The 300 MeV synchrotron was Cornell's first, fabricated and operated in the basement of Newman Lab. The 300 MeV synchrotron was completed in 1949 and was in use until 1951. Parts of it were then used in later synchrotrons.
In his dark basement lab in Wurzberg Germany in 1895, Wilhelm Röntgen produced the first-ever X-ray image using a cathode ray tube – a radiograph of his wife’s hand, wedding ring and all. Today, 60 feet below the Cornell University campus, at the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS), researchers utilize X-rays that are 100 million times more intense than Röntgen's first…
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This series of images, captured by three high-speed video cameras filming at 4,000 frames per second, track a dragonfly as it was released upside-down from a magnetic tether and rolled 180 degrees to reorient itself.
With their stretched bodies, immense wingspan and iridescent coloring, dragonflies are a unique sight. But their originality doesn’t end with their looks: As one of the oldest insect species on the planet, they are an early innovator of aerial flight.
Now, a group led by Jane Wang, professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences and professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering in…
Dave Burbank/Cornell University
Jeffrey Palmer (left) and Malte Ziewitz, recipients of the 2022 Robert and Helen Appel Fellowship for Humanists and Social Scientists, at a May 10 reception.
At the end of each academic year, the College of Arts & Sciences recognizes excellence in teaching and advising. This year’s award winners include Jeffrey Palmer and Malte Ziewitz, recipients of the 2022 Robert and Helen Appel Fellowship for Humanists and Social Scientists; Alex Ophir, recipient of the 2022 Robert A. and Donna B. Paul Academic Advising Award; and Kyle Lancaster, recipient of…
EHT Collaboration/Provided
This is the first image of Sagittarius A\*, the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy.
An international team of more than 300 scientists from 80 institutions has created the first-ever image of the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy.
Called Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), the image was produced by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration, using observations from a worldwide network of radio telescopes.
The image is a long-anticipated look at the…
Declaring this the “decisive decade” for climate action, Cornell launched The 2030 Project: A Climate Initiative, which will mobilize world-class faculty to develop and accelerate tangible solutions to the climate challenge. From transforming food and energy systems and reducing greenhouse emissions to advancing environmental justice and shaping policy, Cornell will use practical science to…
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Like all cnidarians, the sea anemone, Nematostella vectensis, has cnidocytes, or stinging cells.
The cnidocytes – or stinging cells – that are characteristic of sea anemones, hydrae, corals and jellyfish, and make us careful of our feet while wading in the ocean, are also an excellent model for understanding the emergence of new cell types, according to new Cornell research.
In new research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on May 2, Leslie Babonis,…
How might we extract the tech-essential mineral lithium sustainably from seawater? Will doctors someday engineer super-immune T cells? How do dialects arise in language? Why do we forget?
The College of Arts and Sciences (A&S) has awarded seven New Frontier Grants totaling $1.25 million to faculty members pursuing critical developments in areas ranging from quantum materials to…
Migrations: A Global Grand Challenge, part of Global Cornell, has awarded grants totaling more than $500,000 to support faculty research addressing wide-ranging questions around domestic and global migration.
Funded projects this cycle reflect the Migrations initiative’s interdisciplinary priorities of racism, dispossession and migration in the United States – supported by the Mellon…
Ryan Young / Cornell University
2022 Cornell Campus-Community Leadership Award winners Claire Deng ’22 (left) and Temilola (Lola) Adepoju ’22
Four students have received the 2022 Cornell Campus-Community Leadership Award, an annual honor given by the Division of University Relations to graduating seniors who have shown exceptional town-gown leadership and innovation.
The four students were joined by family, friends and Cornell staff and faculty at the May 5 virtual ceremony, hosted by Joel Malina, vice president…
The 2022 Cornell Undergraduate Psychology (CUP) Conference will bring together undergraduate students with diverse psychology interests to share their research, meet other students and faculty, and learn about the various kinds of psychological research being conducted across the Cornell campus.
The conference will be held May 12 from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. in Martha Van Rensselaer (MVR) Hall. Talk…
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A hole 22 meters in diameter near the summit of Cerro Chajnantor in Chile’s Atacama Desert, at an elevation of 18,400 feet stands ready for the cement foundation on which the Fred Young Submillimeter Telescope will one day rest.
An enormous hole 22 meters in diameter has been dug near the summit of Cerro Chajnantor in Chile’s Atacama Desert, at an elevation of 18,400 feet. The hole stands ready for the cement foundation on which the Fred Young Submillimeter Telescope (FYST, pronounced “feest”) will one day rest. The foundation, which was designed in Chile, began construction in the fall of 2021 and is scheduled…
Zepyoor Khechadoorian, graduate student in the field of physics, is one of 80 students selected to receive the prestigious U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science Graduate Student Research Award (SCGSR) for the 2021 Solicitation 2 cycle. The fellowship provides world-class training and access to state-of-the-art facilities and resources at DOE national laboratories. Khechadoorian…
Under the artistic direction of pianists Miri Yampolsky and Xak Bjerken, the Department of Music in the College of Arts and Sciences presents Mayfest, its annual springtime festival of world-class chamber music. Held May 20-24, Mayfest will feature performances by exceptional guest artists from around the world.
Bjerken and Yampolsky say they look forward to this celebration of music,…
Etienne Desclides/ Unsplash
Ferrofluids were invented in 1963 by NASA to create liquid rocket fuel that could be drawn toward a fuel pump in a weightless environment by applying a magnetic field.
Holding the right material at the right angle, Cornell researchers have discovered a strategy to switch the magnetization in thin layers of a ferromagnet – a technique that could eventually lead to the development of more energy-efficient magnetic memory devices.
The team’s paper, “Tilted Spin Current Generated by the Collinear Antiferromagnet Ruthenium Dioxide,” published May 5 in Nature…
Misperceptions of marginalized and disadvantaged communities’ level of concern regarding COVID-19, as well as other issues such as climate change, constitutes a form of social misinformation that may undermine cooperation and trust needed to address collective problems, according to new Cornell-led research.
“If we misperceive who is most concerned about pressing threats like COVID or…
Another Believer/Creative Commons license 3.0
Interior of the National Academy of Sciences, Washington, D.C.
An agricultural economist, a theoretical physicist, a plant biologist and a physiologist have each been elected to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), the academy announced May 3.
The newly elected members include Chris Barrett, the Stephen B. and Janice G. Ashley Professor in the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management in the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business;…
Verity Platt
Installation by artist Rhonda Weppler, featuring cast resin fungi and Cornell’s cast of the Apollo Sauroktonos.
This month, shoppers at the Ithaca Mall will have something more exciting to view than price tags and bargain bins: The Sculpture Shoppe, an exhibition of plaster reproductions of classical Greco- Roman art from the Cornell Cast Collection and responses to cast culture and classical art by contemporary artists and thinkers.
The exhibition opens May 5 at 6 pm with a live performance of MUSE–AK:…
National Army Museum/Provided
The British military kept statistics on regiments posted all over the world, such as the 84th (York and Lancaster) Regiment of Foot, an England-based unit stationed in Jamaica in the 1860s; here the regiment band is shown in Jamaica in a 1868 photo.
Charles Darwin raised the question of whether darker skin is correlated with immunity to certain diseases in his 1871 book “The Descent of Man,” an erroneous claim that reflected beliefs about the reality and fixity of race that were widespread in the mid-19th century, according to new Cornell research.
But only a few decades earlier, people did not think of race this way, according to Suman…
Throughout the spring semester, the inaugural RAD Public History Fellows have been digging deep into library archives and bringing their discoveries to light in creative ways – from social media posts to displays of artifacts and tours of library exhibits.
Cornell University Library and the Cornell Public History Initiative (PHI) launched the fellowship for undergraduate students in January,…
Do you ever wonder why some frogs use complex calls to attract mates? Or what tropical birds eat? Or how shrimp see?
Matthew Zipple does. A Klarman Postdoctoral Fellow in neurobiology and behavior in the College of Arts and Sciences and an animal behavior expert, Zipple studies highly social animals, such as primates, whales, elephants and humans. But he’s also perpetually curious about…
